“We’re looking forward to the other exciting discoveries hidden in the mission’s treasure trove of data. “TESS just completed its second year of northern sky observations,” said Allison Youngblood, a research astrophysicist and the TESS deputy project scientist at Goddard. While the researchers use other space and ground-based observatories to conduct follow-up observations of the intriguing planetary system, more TESS data is pouring in. “But the signal was so faint that we needed the additional year of transit observations to identify it.” “If the star was a little closer or the planet a little bigger, we might have been able to spot TOI 700 e in the first year of TESS data,” said study coauthor Ben Hord, a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a graduate researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in a statement. In 2020, the mission refocused on the southern sky again for additional observations, revealing the fourth planet in the TOI 700 system. On 23 July 2015, NASA announced Kepler-452b, a near-Earth-size planet orbiting the habitable zone of a G2-type star. The mission began observing the southern sky in 2018, then turned to the northern sky. These dips in luminosity indicate orbiting planets as they pass in front of their stars, called transits. The TESS mission, launched in 2018, monitors large portions of the night sky for 27 days at a time, staring at the brightest stars and tracking their changes in brightness. The newly announced planet e is actually located between planets c and d.Ĭenter for Astrophysics/Harvard & Smithsonianĭoomed exoplanet will be obliterated as it spirals into a star The two exoplanets in the habitable zone of the star, planets d and e, have longer orbits of 37 days and 28 days, respectively, because they’re a little more distant from the star. These planets are both likely tidally locked, meaning they always show the same side to the star - much like how the same side of the moon always faces Earth. Then there’s TOI 700 c, which is 2.5 times bigger than our planet and finishes one orbit around the star every 16 days. Over half were discovered by NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope, a resilient observatory that far outlasted its original planned mission. More than 5,000 planets are confirmed to exist beyond our solar system. Small, cool M dwarf stars like TOI 700 are common in the universe, and many have been found to host exoplanets in recent years, like the TRAPPIST-1 system and its seven exoplanets that the James Webb Space Telescope will observe.Ĭlosest to the star is TOI 700 b, which is 90% of Earth’s size and completes one rapid orbit around the star every 10 Earth days. 1 day ago &0183 &32 This discovery marks the conclusion of Kepler’s prolific planet-finding mission that contributed to the discovery of over 2,500 exoplanets. Planet e is about 10% smaller than planet d, so the system also shows how additional TESS observations help us find smaller and smaller worlds.” “That makes the TOI 700 system an exciting prospect for additional follow-up. “This is one of only a few systems with multiple, small, habitable-zone planets that we know of,” said lead study author Emily Gilbert, a postdoctoral fellow at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. TESS mission spots Earth-size potentially habitable planet and 'Tatooine' system
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